Sub CO Fired After Falsified Chemistry Records Discovered

When something goes wrong on a ship – fire the CO! That’s conventional wisdom in the US Navy. And it has been since the days of sail.

On October 23, I reported on the USS Hampton’s incident where the ship’s ELTs (Engineering Laboratory Technicians) were reportedly falsifying the records of their daily analysis of the reactor’s chemistry. According to the AP story, this didn’t just happen once, but rather for a whole month (or more).

My guess was that the Commanding Officer (CO) and the Engineer (the person in charge of the department that runs the reactor) would lose their jobs.

Now another AP story has confirmed my guess. The CO has been relieved of his command. (Fired in civilian terminology.)

Will a thorough root cause analysis of this incident be conducted? It seems the corrective actions (punishment for the crew and firing of the CO) has already occurred, so don’t hold your breath.

The firings have already occurred, the crew will be retrained, and a tough new CO will be brought aboard to make sure this never happens again. All they would need to do is to write a new procedure and they will have covered all the standard corrective action bases that we joke about in TapRooT® Courses.